


is it an apocalypse or nihilism on your lips?

by AndreaLyn



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: M/M, Platonic Cuddling, Spooning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:00:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25225714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndreaLyn/pseuds/AndreaLyn
Summary: The first night he meets the people from his dreams, Booker learns about Joe and Nicky and the love between them. It’s what Booker had, then lost, and may never find again if he keeps going down the path he’s on.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 108
Kudos: 1400





	is it an apocalypse or nihilism on your lips?

**Author's Note:**

> You know, at one point, this was going to be a very light fic about how Booker was introduced to how _In Love_ Joe and Nicky are, and then it mutated into this look into his grief. 
> 
> Title comes from _Waves_ by Bastille.

Sébastien Le Livre died by the rope before the dreams came. 

There are four of them. There is a woman with an axe, cutting her way through armies and leaving a trail of blood behind her. He feels the rage and grief of another woman drowning at the bottom of the ocean. Two men, fiercely deadly and yet, tied to one another. They all live in his dreams until the day they don’t. 

It had taken nearly a week for him to slip the noose from his neck, collapsing weakly against the ground to struggle his way to a questionable freedom.

Crawling along the frozen ground, Sébastien’s fingers scrabble at the dirt until they grab upon a boot. He stares up, blood dripping down his mouth from the crow he’d eaten to sate his gnawing hunger. This is the last way he wants to be found, but they’re not strangers.

They are the ones from their dreams. 

“You have questions.”

Questions can wait. His more pressing demand is for food, for warmth, for new clothes. 

The woman hears his croaked plea and then nods, gesturing like a general to the other two men, who haul him up by the arms and pry him from the ground. He loses consciousness as they move him or he dies and takes a little longer to resurrect himself, but either way, he comes around to consciousness in time to see a broken-down house. 

They talk in his tongue, maybe out of respect, and he hears them squabbling about their accommodations. They give him their names (Andromache is their leader, Joe is carrying his right arm and Nicky his left).

Their French is good, even if their names don’t belong anywhere in Napoleon’s France. 

“We need to get out of Russia,” the leader says. “We’ll bunk here tonight.” It’s a deserted, derelict space, and Sébastien thinks of rats crawling over his body as he sleeps with disgust. Still, they’re right.

The last thing he needs is the Grande Armée discovering him again. He needs to get back to France, to his family, but allies are a hard thing to come by. He’ll take the ones he’s got. 

These soldiers move efficiently, setting down their packs and finding a corner they can sleep in. Sébastien spends a long time staring at the two men as they arrange themselves on a dusty old rag as if it’s a mattress, watching as the one (Joe, he thinks his name might be from the hurried introductions earlier) wraps his arms securely around the other. Russia is frigid, the temperature only part of why he’d turned traitor, but his new situation leaves him wary about protocol.

He might not be a good soldier for Napoleon’s desires, but he’s still a soldier at his heart and orders and protocol are engrained in him.

Sébastien glances to Andromache, gesturing to the men on the ground, who are curled tightly together, tangling their legs into one messy pile. “Are we supposed to do that?”

“Not unless you want blood on your uniform,” Joe replies while Andromache grins at him, shark-like, and Sébastien wonders if she means to bleed him dry with her teeth. “This is who Nicky and I are.” It’s spoken in a matter of fact way, a statement, not something that brooks explanation. “He’s my life.” 

Sébastien says nothing, turning over to grab a threadbare blanket, bunking down nearby. 

When he lies down, shivering, arms wrapped around himself, his direct line of sight is to the two men. Fiercely, he misses his wife’s touch with an ache that bites at him sharper than any of Andromache’s weapons could. 

This is who they are. 

Sébastien has seen soldiers turn to one another for comfort and warmth during the war, but the longer he spends with his new army, the more he sees that this is not a moment in time. This is not them leaning on each other because they have no one else. This is them choosing each other in all ways. They are the other half of each other’s soul and Sébastien is an observer who will not change that.

They have no shame around him. 

Joe always curls around Nicky, holding him possessively tight. They think Sébastien can’t hear them in the middle of the night as Joe whispers loving endearments in Italian, that he can’t understand them, but he can. Even if he doesn’t know the words, he understands the love and the warmth of his tone.

He misses his wife. He misses her warmth, her touch, her love. 

When they return to France, Sébastien knows that there’s no way he can stay with these people. It doesn’t matter that they’re in his dreams and they rescued him from the frozen hell of Russia. 

“I have a family,” he tells Andromache. 

“One day, you won’t.”

Her words are bitter and cruel, but not enough to make Sébastien change his mind. 

“When you need someone else, come find us,” Joe says, pressing a piece of paper into Sébastien’s hand. “Here, an address to write to. Tell us where to find you, and we’ll come back for you.”

“Good luck, Sébastien,” Nicky tells him. “We will see you again.” He sounds sad about it, but Sébastien has a family to return to. 

They are the only thing that matters.

If this gift has given him anything, it’s a chance to be with them. Sébastien intends to take it, and hold tight to his wife the same way Joe held onto Nicky in the cold of Russia’s winter.

* * *

Time passes. 

He doesn’t die, no matter how hard people try and kill him.

He learns to hate it. 

Sébastien is Booker now, and he’s just watched the last of his children die, because his own immortal gifts cannot be shared. He’s learned new languages to help with his way in the world, but that’s helped with nothing. What’s the point of eternity if he has to lose everyone he loves to do it? 

It’s why he had joined Andy’s team. With his youngest infected with disease, Booker had known it would only be a matter of time before his life was gone, and he would need something to do other than drink and despair. 

He had never considered he would lose his child so soon.

Forty-two, only forty-two. 

His _baby_ is gone.

Booker’s clothes are soaked with brandy as he stumbles back to the house they’ve been staying in. Andy is scouting for them to find their new mission, but she had left strict instructions for Joe and Nicky to watch him, as if he’s an infant who needs it.

He’s no child. 

No child could bear the weight of the grief on his chest, threatening to kill him. What does it matter, though? Even if the grief did the trick, the immortality would bring him back so he could drown in it all over again.

He stumbles on his way inside, singing a funeral lament loudly, off-key. It wakes Joe, he sees, though Nicky only contracts and burrows deeper into Joe’s touch. “Joe,” Booker mumbles, crawling to his hands and knees, shoving himself in between Joe and Nicky, murmuring under his breath, soft pleas. _Please, for tonight, please god, don’t let me be alone tonight._

“Booker,” Nicky groans, finally awake and turning to face him.

He wants what they have. 

He _had_ it and he had to watch it die. 

“I know this is how you are,” Booker mumbles, the alcohol doing nothing to damage any part of him. His body will heal it, it will heal the damage to his brain and his liver, but it won’t heal the pain. 

It’s a bastard, like that. 

“Let me have it. Tonight,” he begs. 

Nicky says something in Italian to Joe that Booker doesn’t catch, but he presses a hand to the top of Booker’s head in a way that feels like benediction. What he does recognize is the antiquated blessing Nicky gives him, and there’s no mistaking the rough-hewn groan from Joe as he accepts what’s happening.

Tonight, they hold him the way they hold each other, pressed together in mourning with him.

Tomorrow, they’ll go out into the world to pick a fight, wage a war, and Booker will be at their sides permanently. 

Andy was right. The day has come, where he must leave behind his last family and forge a new one. 

Maybe this one won’t end so painfully.

(Or maybe he hasn’t even begun to learn how deeply grief can ache)

* * *

It takes a century, but he finds his way back to them once the banishment is complete.

Their reunion on the beach is already a distant memory. Nile had hugged him for so long that he thinks maybe she’d left a few bruises before his body healed them up. Nicky and Joe had waited their turn, then brought him back to the London safehouse, where a king-sized bed awaits.

Joe and Nicky don’t need that much space, but he’s so thankful it’s here, because it’s been a long hundred years. He’s lost count of how many times he didn’t think he’d make it. They’re all exhausted, ready to collapse, and while they might be moving out to a new mission tomorrow, there’s the matter of sleeping to think about tonight.

Booker could leave. There’s another bed nearby, but he hesitates as he watches Joe and Nicky’s routine, the two of them tangling their bodies together until they’re closer to being one.

They don’t tell him to go. 

“Vieni qui,” Nicky mumbles, clearly too tired for English. 

The sob he lets out is an embarrassment for a man as old as he is, but it’s the first time in a century that he won’t be truly alone. He’d thought he’d known before, what it was to feel like that, but time has proven he had no idea. Quynh had shown him that he had no notion of true grief, and the years did the rest. He finds the space they’ve left for him and fits himself in it tightly, scared it will go away if he leaves it too long.

“Don’t fuck up again like that, Booker,” Joe warns, wrapping his arm around them both, his fingers fitting against the small of Nicky’s back as he pulls them both in. “You don’t want to know what I’ll do to you if you hurt Nicky again.”

He knows. He _knows_. 

The warning look in Nicky’s eyes is a silent threat of its own, but Booker’s learned his lesson. He’s lost a family once before. He’s lost parts of this one in the last century, too. 

It’s time to stop running from his grief and instead, find a purpose in it like Nile has. It’s time to accept he will always be jealous of what Joe and Nicky have. 

This is who they are. Booker isn’t sure who he is, yet, but he’s going to learn to be better at it. For them, and for Nile.

Most of all, he owes a better life to Andy. 

Joe and Nicky have always had each other, but Booker has them too. And that’s how it’ll be. 

He’s not losing this family, not if he can help it.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not very entertaining, but I am on [tumblr](https://andrea-lyn.tumblr.com/) for anyone who wants to scream about these immortal idiots with me.


End file.
